Friday, April 15, 2011

GASES THAT BOUNCE OFF EACH OTHER

At normal temperatures, when 2 gas clouds meet, one passes through the other. Conversely, when ultracold gases millions of times thinner than the air meet, they bounce each other under the influence of quantum mechanical interactions able to model the matter at extreme conditions like those that occur inside neutron stars or quark-gluon plasma formed immediately after the Big Bang.

Martin Zwierlein(MIT), studying the movement of lithium isotopes managed to condition to collide its fermions with each other (scattering), under the influence of magnetic fields. To eliminate the effects of temperature, Zwierlein cooled gassified lithium atoms at temperatures close to absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius), using magnetic forces to separate gas clouds in 2 : “spin up” and “spin down”, the same that at collision were repelled. Ariel Sommer, another experimenter added that although ultimately the gasses diffused one into another it took more than 1 second, a long time to microscopic scales. The researchers now plan to confine the gases of lithium in 2-dimensions, a study that would allow and encourage the confinement of electrons in high-temperature superconductors and predict the behavior of high- density neutron stars (10 km in diameter), more massive than our sun and quark-gluon plasma recreated in large particle accelerators (Large Hadron Collider).